Saturday, June 02, 2007
More Students Want to Study Politics
We keep hearing about how young people are not interested in politics, yet today there is a little proof that this is far from the case. The latest Political Studies Association Newsletter has some figures which show that the numbr of applications for politics courses has shot up over the last six years. In 2000 only 14,946 students applied to study politics at university. Last year, 2006, the number had risen to 25,212. The number of acceptances has also risen from 2,641 to 4,180 - this means only 1 in 6 applicants is actually successful. Politic sis now the 37th most popular out of 82 recorded disciplines. I wonder if the same trend is apparent at 'A' Level?
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34 comments:
Yes, I believe it is.
The question, of course, is what does one do with a politics degree.
As a U.K undergraduate, a student of History and Modern Languages, it comes to little surprise to me that so many U.K students are enrolling in Politics degrees.
Although, I would argue that the depth of conviction that many politics undergraduates have is, in many cases, limited. Politics is simply another way of getting a degree.
Nevertheless, from all corners, these statistics should be welcomed as encouraging!
It's also interesting how many students want to study medicine - so many that it's very difficult to get a place. Now, if life in the NHS is as grim as some doctors allege, I wonder why so many school-leavers are so keen to join them?! Couldn't be that doctors' woes are largely in the minds of Tory spin-masters could it?
Not very surprising. One career route after politics (or politics with another subject) is into the civil service. With public sector pay increasing far faster than private sector pay, the trend is hardly surprising.
I did politics because I was quite interested. It killed my interest for twenty five years after that!
I had to study the US and the UK System - not the interesting bits.. the committees, the pork barrelling, primaries (which I still dont understand!) etc etc.
Nothing at all about the actual machinations and interesting stuff.
Good luck to them. Anyway, nowadays it doesnt matter a stuff what your degree is actually in.
What saddo is sitting in front of a kompooter on a day like this anyway??
Just an easy option to delay the inevitable of getting out to work.
Afterall the students can either take off Blair and lie their way through the course or be like Cameron and say anything even to changing ones mind and doing a U turn.
I studied politics at A-Level, though I had to do it as people wishing to study politics dropped dramatically.
I was considering it as a degree subject, but in the end opted for Computer Science. I'd like to work in politics, but the security offered by a CS degree was far greater than taking a chance.
abit off topic,
you can watch Iain on "The Panel" RTE have just uploaded it
http://www.rte.ie/tv/thepanel/video.html
hughes views
As far as Doctors are concerned.
No I think it has more to do with the fact that it is the best and soon to be the only way to get a working visa out of this place with any chance of a well payed respected safe job at the end of it.
If I was young again I would quite simply have no idear what direction to go in. The world and this country is changing so fast hairdressing could be the only real job left by 2030 for all I know.
Politics however is and always has been an easy and quick way to get somekind of graduate qualification.
Unfortuately is now seems to be also the only way the truely stupid can get a well paid job with status and power that gives your a liftime index linked tax free pension for life for only being in the job for 4 years.
So being a "qualified" policically indoctrinated ignorent graduate with a university indoctinated superiority complex, could well seem to be as good an option as any these days.
Mog
What saddo is ect.
Good point.
However I have already done the walk to the park thing and taken my young son to the local travelling fun fair, on Friday.
The thought of getting the car out to do some pointless shopping or going driving to the pub in THIS trafic, risking my liecence my liberty and getting ripped off £10 each, for a tiny crap pub lunch is too offputting to say the least.
Life in london is only now good for criminals or for criminaly irresponsible 'other peoples cash' wasters.
I travel a lott and vastly prefure to spend my hard earned in other less expensive more free countrys.
A habit more and more sensible hard working self made rich people are participating in everyday.
Hughes Views: I suggest you log on to NHSBlogDoc for the truth about the NHS. The gentleman who runs it is a self-avowed Labour voter.
It the Conservatives were good enough to fool thousands of doctors into believing that the NHS was worse than it is, they would be in Government by now.
Training up blog readers? Waste of space doing politics A level I'd have thought. That way lies rejection. Presumably lots of these little darlings think they will be politicians when they grow up.
Over the next 30 years at this rate of growth we will be training up quarter of a million wannabe MPs with mickey mouse degrees.
Rather like most art courses - performing and visual - are training up audiences not creators so it goes with this I think ...
As a slight digression, on this wonderful weather day, I was listening to Radio 3 and a discussion on IRCAM (A prestige establishment, founded in the 1970s, based in Paris, for Electronic Music). I was wondering whether the French take their university political education just as seriously. If so, why has French unemployment been so cronic for so long?
No surprise there then.
Politics was a joke when I studied it at 'A' level. I was advised to
study fro a degree in one of my 'more substantial' subjects or be unemployed.
Nulab have so corrupted politics and so enriched themselves during the last decade that it's become the working class escape route to undreamed of riches and power.
Talking of Political battlegrounds for students of the subject:
From the Torygraph today:
"Britain 'isolated' over new treaty for Europe"
So the Germans and the French are going to bounce us yet again. What's the betting that Blair does not have the bottle to stand up to them? As for Cameron - well, what is his position in this and the promised referendum?
Only becuse it is so easy I seriously think I could pass a Politics degree in a free month , what is there to learn ?.There is also going to be a Kennedy school in London financed by Russian billionaire Len Blavatnik which may be based at the LSE. Its supposed to be a bit like the French Ecole Nationale or the Kennedy school of Government at Harvard.
Oh God! Now they are farming them. When can we have the first cull?
The other trolls are right: this is nothing to do with enthusiasm for politics, just a lack of enthusiasm for harder subjects like Maths or History.
Umm, let me see... I could learn about great events and epic conflicts or... the internal machinations of the Labour movement. Nobody who is interested in REAL politics, in the sense of making a differnce to the world, would dream of doing a politics degree.
If I've offended anybody by saying this, get used to it: you're stupid.
Young people are interested in politics. Their problem is that they such self-obssessed little jerks that they sniffily reject voting because a political party of many people hasn't bent to their superior will and adopted all of what said sniffy individual believes in.
In short - immature intolerant idiots with no experience of having to work with others.
I have never read such a string of ignorant comments on any one post (and that is saying something). They reflect the sort of comments that some undergraduates receive when they say they are studying politics (usually of the 'so you want to be Prime Minister?' or 'What do you think of Tony Blair?' variety) and similarly show a remarkable ingnorance of what politics is. Politics is a demanding subject and, as the figures Iain quotes imply, the discipline can recruit very good students. What is more, the nature of the subject contributes to a wide range of careers. The person who opted for computer science, thinking it offered more secure career prospects, omits the fact that it is remarkably limited degree in terms of career prospects. One is stuck in a way politics graduates are not. A recruiter from one of this country's leading companies once told me that, of all disciplines, she had a preference for politics students - more able to analyse problems - and, if anything, preferred to avoid students trained in computer science: 'too much tunnel vision'. Students who opt to study politics thinking it is a soft option, or that it is just about British politics, are in for a rude awakening. They need to be intellectually able as well as having reasonably broad shoulders to cope with the sort of comments made by the ill-informed, exemplified by the contributions to this post.
Hitch.
1. Stop double posting
2. Stop swearing.
As an early 90's politics student I found there was a fair bit more to it than just the "A-level syllabus" of straightforward comparative government of the UK and US systems. I found it to be a good combination of history, economics, psychology, statistics, geography, law, sociology... and a good basis for understanding why this country and the world are run the way they are. I wouldn't say it's an easy option; it's clearly a different discipline than a medicine, science, or engineering course, but it is useful in understanding systems, analysing theories and opinions, and collating and presenting information effectively.
One is stuck in a way politics graduates are not.
Also in the way a tramp is not you pontificating twerp.I know numerous Politics graduates and I am pleased to report that they can be characterised as likeably dim but harmless. They universally opted for a baby subject with the entirely laudable motive of drinking more . Fine people in short .
This cliché spouter is giving a pleasant bunch of slackers a bad name.Shame really
"In 2000 only 14,946 students applied to study politics at university. Last year, 2006, the number had risen to 25,212. The number of acceptances has also risen from 2,641 to 4,180 - this means only 1 in 6 applicants is actually successful."
Are you sure it isn't one in six *applications* - considering that each student is allowed to apply to six different universities through UCAS, it might make sense that way too.
Sadly my reaction to this is rather cynical and therefore not encouraging:
Firstly, I suspect that for many would be students, politics is seen as an easy degree. This may not be true, of course; but given the number of idiots in politics it is easy to conclude that as a job it can't be that hard.
Secondly; I suspect many see a politics degree as a passport to a lucrative career. Hang conviction, it's all about getting a cushy job with about the only decent pension left in Britain. One only has top look at the amoral crowd currently infesting Whitehall as Spads, thinktankers etc to see this phenomenon already in action.
I'm not really sure this is the kind of "interest" in politics that should be encouraged.
I think that it was the late Douglas Adams who, correctly in my mind, suggested that "the desire to become a politician should be regarded as a lifetime bar to becoming one".
Just completed my BA in politics. Have to say I enjoyed it but I found that a lot of topics were historically based. Had a lot of leftleaning types on my course who just wanted to moan about Bush and Blair. I didn't come across many modules that were able to accommodate for this. A politics degree will give undergraduates the opportunity to discuss parties, events in history and so on but I found my knowledge developed most in areas of philosophy, political systems, structures etc.
If I do postgraduate I will study ideology.
A politics degree will give undergraduates the opportunity to discuss parties, events .....
Thats the way I remember it add sport and girls and you have the beast entirely
I know quite a few people like Newmania and I am quite capable, like him, of generalising on the basis of limited subjective experience. He seems to know as much about the study of politics as he does, to judge from his previous posts, of the English language. Perhaps he could do a joint degree in English and Politics? Then, again, he may not qualify for admittance.
Does Newmania have a complex? Name a subject in which you can't find some students who are nice but dim. I have met some extraordinarily bright politics graduates, including working at the top of some major successful multinationals.
Just what we need! While the Indians and Chinese churn out millions of science/tech graduates ...
The USSR and China did not permit the study of politics. Strange that. India, a democracy, does have students studying politics.
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